This is hard to write, but it has to be written.
Sweden is in the grip of a crisis and nobody seems to know what to do about it. There is, simply, a revolt going on.
Revolt against whom? Against what?
Well, I am not so sure. And in fact, I'm not sure anybody knows. It is not like the great uprising in Harlem many years ago (yes, I was there, reporting for Scandinavia's largest newspaper, Swedish Expressen). At that time, the cops fired their revolvers upward at the roofs where young, black guys (and some girls, too) threw rocks at anyone down there—mostly cops and reporters. Many were hurt and more were scared. Most white people saw to it to have no business in the “black” parts of town for quite some time. We, who at the time wrote about the incident, wrote many pieces about how integration had failed in the U.S., how the blacks were discriminated against, and so on. And on. It should not be denied that there was an element of schadenfreude in this: damned white Americans, so rich, so overbearing, they could have it. The fact that black Americans love their country very much, too, was forgotten.

We, the foreign reporters, I have to say, behaved and wrote like hypocrites, taking a stand against what we perceived as the establishment and for the underprivileged.
But enough of that.

Now, it is Sweden that's in crisis. One Stockholm youth after another often is in revolt. In Husby, Jacobsberg, Kista, Rinkeby, Skarpnäck and many other places, young people have gone out to make trouble, set fires, burn cars, attack “svennar” (Sven, a Swedish name, is used to mean a light skinned, native-born Swede). How many cars were burned nobody knows, neither do we know how many people have been hurt. What we do know is the suburbs mentioned are in chaos and no one in Stockholm (or the rest of the country, for that matter) speaks much of anything else. Sweden, where people have for a long time congratulated themselves for being peaceful, different from rowdy people like the French, Italians or Americans—well, the Swedes suddenly find out that “we” are not so different anymore.

There are more and more immigrants from almost everywhere. And they elicit misunderstandings, resentments and outright violence. Turns out “we” are perhaps not so different, after all. Perhaps we got the wrong immigrants or—perish the thought—we didn't treat the ones that came as well as we should have.
I can only state, with great certainty, that I do not pretend to know.
Doubtlessly, the riots and burnings will lead to extensive debate and some political decisions. For instance, there is no doubt the police will be given greater authority—and better resources.

I now foresee a long row of weeks when the debate in Sweden will deal with little else than violence and unrest in local ethnic concentrations or immigrant communities. To which Americans and others should be allowed to say:
Welcome to the club!

World Reporter
Ulf Nilson, World reporter since his first assignments to Hungary in 1956. Correspondent and Sweden’s man in America for 20 years, Ulf Nilson is still a regular columnist in Sweden’s daily Expressen, and regular contributor in Nordstjernan. He has authored or co-authored over fifty books. He lives in southern France or at his beloved Värmdö, just 30 minutes north of Stockholm. He
• covered the US, including Vietnam during the war years
• marched in the civil rights marches
• interviewed Martin Luther King
• met presidents Johnson, Nixon, Reagan and George H. W. Bush
• and, as one of Sweden’s most well-known journalists, also met with every politician, industry leader or cultural personality—all the movers and shakers of Sweden through five decades of a proliferate professional life.